Plex is the ideal application to use for what you want. Just go to www.plexapp.com to download it.

Plex is now made up of two applications. These are Plex Media Server and Plex Media Centre. The server installs to the menu bar where it mostly sits in the background cataloging your media. The Media Centre is the front end player.

I have Plex on all my machines, but only the iMac has the server setup. All of the other machines use the iMac's Plex Server to grab the data.

My media is also all stored remotely on a separate NAS Drive. I have my NAS arranged with different types of media in different folders. Each of these media folders are linked to the Plex Media Server as separate Media Sources (Library Sections). I have sections such as Comedy, TV Shows, Movies etc

You store the media in these folders by show name or movie title etc. Typically I store TV shows in the following way
Media Server\TV\Name of Show\Season 1\Name of Show S01E10.avi Plex is then clever enough to look up the show and use the S01E10 data to find the info for Season 1 Episode 10
Movies, I just store in sub folders by the movie name.

Plex server sorts all this out for you and scrapes the show info, posters, theme tune etc from the internet. This data is then used to provide a rich user interface in the Media Centre.

The Media Centre application looks for a Plex Server on your network to find the data to display.

In Plex Media Centre the shows I showed in the screen shot above would be displayed like this.

clicking on to a show takes you to its season listings

and from there to the episode lists

From there you can play any of the episodes. Unwatched episodes are highlighted with a white dot after the title so you can quickly see which ones you have watched and which you have not.

All of the above is sorted out by pled. All you have to do is to setup the Plex Media Server is to point it at the media and then name the files in the correct way. Plex will then look it up and sort all the screens out for you. It really is a great interface and it looks superb._________________Phil

I took the plunge yesterday - took a bit of getting my head round, but all I can say is wow!! Well impressed with it - can quite get my head round the apps bit - but it's my first mac - so I'll get there eventually.

I was well impressed with the way it catalogues my shows - including an obscure Ozzie show!!!!

I think you've probably sussed most of it already, it really is pretty simple once you get it set up.

Movies and TV need to be split up as each uses a different scraping service to collect its data so you need to tell Plex if a section of your library contains films or tv.

I also split things further so I have separate sections for things like standup DVDs which I have in Comedy, TV sitcoms etc I have in TV Comedy. Documentary's and reality type fly on walls I put in TV Factual. The rest goes in TV Shows.

You can also split things further by having collections. so in Movies I have a Harry Potter collection, a War collection, Crime etc. Similarly in TV shows I have Crime, Sci-Fi, War etc In the Screen shot above of the media manager I just created a Sample collection and drag a few shows into it.

One thing to keep an eye on is how you name new shows so it can quickly find them. I find the easiest way is to jump over to http://www.thetvdb.com/ and look up how the show is titled there first. and check out the season numbering etc.
Specials tend to classed as Season 0.

I also have Plex (Player) set up to use the Apple Remote and also the mouse which makes it easier to operate on the TV. You can also get an iPhone / iPad app for Plex which allows you to stream you media to the iOs device as well, and also allows you to use it as a remote control._________________Phil

I had split the TV into series etc - the idea of genre is quite a good one.

I have quite a few shows in my listings so it helps to break things up. You probably don't need it until you have a large library and you can do it at any point. When you create a collection you just drag in the shows, movies you want. they can also be in multiple collections.

Plex already includes Genre's which it grabs when it looks up the shows. When you go into TV you see a listing with All shows, Unwatched etc.. this include by Collection and by Genre. As an example of how I use the collection, I don't group all of my Sci-Fi shows in to my Sci-fi collection. I can get that looking at the Genre. With collections I just add the ones I'm currently watching.

Bluenose wrote:

(totally off topic - I updated imovie, and garage band - I now have 2 icons within launchpad - do you know if I can delete the original ones?

I'm not sure on that one, I don't use LaunchPad. I would check in the Applications folder to see what you have in there and if there are two actual copies.

Just so you understand, the Plex iOS app is more than just a remote. It allows you to stream your entire Plex library to your iOS device. So you can start watching a movie on your iPad, then finish up where you left off on your Mac Mini. There are several other clients as well- Android, Google TV, Samsung, etc.

I don't want to create a new thread so I'll post here. I too am completely new at this.

I was under the impression that you could get the same content with Plex as you would on a jailbroken Apple TV2. I assume they are 'video plug ins' I don't know if I am correct ?
Either way, if I am.. any idea where one would get these plug ins or do I need something else ?

One thing to keep an eye on is how you name new shows so it can quickly find them. I find the easiest way is to jump over to http://www.thetvdb.com/ and look up how the show is titled there first. and check out the season numbering etc.
Specials tend to classed as Season 0.

Hoping you can elaborate just a bit. I've run into problems with some of my content not being recognized. My first thought was then naming convention used. Can you tell me how you integrate TVDB's naming convention into the filename?

I tend to have each show in a folder with the name of the Show, and then sub folders for each season.
So the three examples above would be arranged as follows in various folders and subfolders (shown in bold)